"All the misfortunes of a man are a consequence of not sitting in a quiet room and alone"

Blaise Pascal

Dolphins return to Sardinia. The water in Venice, like the air, is being purified. The Barcelona Boqueria once again turns the tourism market into a neighborhood market. Hotels are opened in Paris to host vagabundos. And the Centre for the Retention of Foreigners (CIE) of the Free Zone of Barcelona has been closed. And evictions have stopped. And it's not spring anymore in El Corte Inglés. The private business has been placed, by decree, at the service of the universal public. The list is very long in a new state of emergency that has become catharsis. But, in spite of everything, the most surprising paradox is that, after the mercantilist decades of neoliberalism, health takes precedence over the economy. On the contrary, the decisive condition limiting current events is precisely the reverse: that it is being done after a cycle that has reached the opposite end. Because the economy was imposed on health – and on politics and the right to housing and culture, and on anything else and everyone else. Yesterday dogma; today, drama.

Of course, the other side of the coin, because there is always the other side of the moon: not confining fines to homeless people, speculative vultures stalking public debt, cars fleeing to second homes in Valencia or the Pyrenees, fake xenophobes, greed, militaristic temptations or 5G authoritarian management that gives us a glimpse of social control tangled. Don't be a spoiler. To some extent, we should not go too far to see it closely: the lesson of the penultimate crisis – that of 2008 – showed too many insolencies, too many pains and lessons, too many mistakes and horrors, which should not be repeated, although some insist on it. And yet, everything is different: novelty, improvisation, contingency and impotence are mixed in a very special way today. But the painful price we are already paying will never be the equivalent of the bill they want to add to us. If the origin – even if it is not exclusively him – is viral, the solution can only be social.

After all, reality has woken up and caught us asleep in the supposed peaceful unreality in which we were installed. More irrational paradoxes, too obsolete. The difficulty of time lost: not the environmentalism that alerts us to our abuses in the last fifty years, not the feminisms that demand us to put life at the center for five decades, nor the reasoned criticisms to the pretension of the globalization of savage capitalism -- they failed to stop, stop and make us think about where we live and where we want to live. In the Cannibal order of the world – using Jean Ziegler’s confirmation map – a new coronavirus has had to come to put it all suddenly and in a wobbly way. It's still about to see how we're going to get out of this shake.

It is clear that the Shock doctrine is already organising its own plan: we will see at the end of all this where some people want us to be confined. And now, more than ever, it's about getting just the opposite: for that doctrine to come back against its designers and get them in its socio-pathetic, cruel and neoliberal nihilism. It's an emergency, we're out of time, it's an emergency, we've got to waste time. To think again. Because if this is a health war, using a warmongering language and a non-neutral patriote, it is necessary to ask now what peace will be created. What we haven't done for decades, we're not going to fix it in a week.

Pascal's old dilemma, to see if we're able to spend a lot of time in the room, thinking and rethinking, holding and supporting us, has become global. And the room is very different: paradoxically it has become a body distance – reason for the alteration and the body of others –, we are locked in ourselves to get out of ourselves, we have had to walk away to get closer to each other, we have had to separate to want one another, to act has to stop. In the meantime, we do not need military or general frames in the prime time claiming the morality of struggle, demanding discipline and sacrifice, in order to conceal with military power the impotence of the health system. Because if you need an army, an unarmed, heroic army, quietly erected and full of littering, it's the army of white aprons, the only one who will win this war, armed with one shot and precarious ammunition. And the only defense was that we stayed at home.

It's the moment of care. We've learned to carefully observe the evolution of the curves, which goes up and frightens us, which is like a hat -- if it's an inescapable reflection. The curves are biological -- and they let us see the weakness that we have since conception -- but it's not a straight line. That other line, that line that goes through each graph the phrase "the limit of the health system", is neither natural nor expected: it is a political line linked to the cuts imposed on public budgets. The other variable is social and, as always, it is in our hands: each gesture is important, each gesture smoothes the curve. That's what we can do, and it's no small thing. "Stay at home," as Manuel de Pedrolo would say in the film Act of Violence. We must clearly understand why in the short term we have to build a firewall: not to defeat a virus, but to prevent the collapse of hospitals due to the overflow of contagion. That is, for saving lives and protecting the weakest. Slogan and slogan, do not lose the north today and tomorrow do not forget all the wings: the first week of confinement has shown more than ever how valuable it is in common life and, in the end, has made other things lose importance. "The coronavirus has defeated money, perhaps the most cruel god of our days," writes Gabriel Magalhaes. It is the democratic counter-factual, post-capitalist, ecologist, pacifist, anti-racist and feminist: after all, it will be very difficult to get out of this, but it will be much more difficult and more impossible not to get out.

"Give the best to avoid the worst" – home and use remedy – say silbando from El Local del Raval, as Ferlosio would say: that blind times do not come that make us worse, nor those that make us more blind. Jorge Reichmann said that, at the time of the bihar, the useless thing would be to try again, unfortunately, to return to the previous position. We will necessarily be in a new place. Phrase by Marina Garces, synthetically: "The virus does not show us the fragility of the human being, but the fragility of the system". And Yayo Herrero, the advanced ecofeminist: if we do not do everything in solidarity and take care of ourselves, the extreme right will shatter. And the philosopher of the guard Alba Rico, who clings to an old and inevitable internationalism: "The only way to save each of us is to save all of us at the same time." That's right, and it can be. After all this, even though the stains don't pass and the consequences are still heavy, there follows the dilemma of Pascal, the dinosaur of Monterroso. And let the dolphins stay in the port of Sardinia. Clean water in the canals of Venice. A popular market in La Boqueria. A closed CIE. No eviction. Hotels protect the evicted. Nobody slept in the street.

The Catalan writer and activist David Fernández has published this article in the journal Ara in its origins with the title "The Global Dilemma of Pascal" on March 21.